


caught on the edge of nothing.

by fluidstatic



Category: Cabin Pressure, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 13:41:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13928283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluidstatic/pseuds/fluidstatic
Summary: Molly dreams of the fall, and Martin struggles to console her.





	caught on the edge of nothing.

Molly hears herself say what needs to be said, in order to empty the room. She opens Sherlock’s body bag, takes his pulse at his neck, and tries to ignore how beautiful and horrible he looks with two pints of blood mingling in his eyes and his hair. Feeling a little foolish, she reminds herself of protocol. She’s expected to get the clothes off the body for the postmortem. She reaches for her scissors, heistates, reconsiders. Deciding she can get Sherlock’s clothes off without ruining them, she carefully unbuttons his shirt.

Not exactly the circumstances I’d hoped to be disrobing you in, she thinks, and bites her lips to suppress a hysterical giggle of fear. She slides the shirt out from under his body. Sherlock does not move to help her free the fabric from under his back, so she wonders if he is unconscious, or holding still out of some perverse form of politeness, or worried about surveillance cameras. When she takes his pulse again, it’s still steady, his skin still cooler than it should be in the heat of June.

She folds his shirt and lays it on the counter behind her, instead of putting it in the evidence bag she’s been given. 

Uncertain about how ethical cutting off his suit trousers would be, she glances at the clock. (Not dealing with a corpse today. But I’ve seen loads of people naked. But it’s Sherlock. But he’s supposed to be dead, so protocol would be - but it’s unethical - but - oh honestly, Molly.) Frustrated with herself, she follows the first alternative that comes to mind; she goes to the sink, wets a cloth, comes back to the table, and begins blotting the coagulating blood out of Sherlock’s eyes.

Again, he lets her. His breathing is shallow, quiet, slow.

There is blood in Sherlock’s eyelashes nostrils, between his lips, dripping from his hairline. His curly dark hair is saturated with it; she imagines blood washing out of his hair, down his neck and shoulders and back, disappearing down her shower drain when all of this is over. The only sound in the room is the tick of the clock, the whirr of the vents. 

Occasionally she glances at the clock on the wall. She takes Sherlock’s pulse, at his wrist, every thirty seconds or so. He is holding steady now, at sixty beats per minute; his skin is cold; his hand is still. All of this fussing and waiting would make him inpatient - at least Molly thinks so.

After eight full minutes (so still, so strange, far too much time, don’t think too hard about it) she hears a second gurney clattering down the hall outside, and to cover her idleness she forces herself to stop prodding at Sherlock’s face and shed a few tears. It’ll look like she’s delayed Sherlock’s autopsy because she’s unduly distressed by the whole situation. As she summons the tears, she realizes that’s not far off - actually she doesn’t like Sherlock right now, for what he’s doing to himself; doesn’t understand it; wants to punch him, strangle him, possibly strand him there in the midst of his own arrogance after all. She turns away from the slab and holds her breath. For an instant, she considers turning back to him and saying,

I’ve changed my mind. 

Sherlock does not move a muscle while Molly cries.

When the second gurney shoves the mortuary doors open, she swipes at her eyes and pretends to be completely shocked to have two dead bodies come her way less than ten minutes apart. Jim - Jim Moriarty - (she shakes her head) Moriarty is lifted from the gurney to an empty slab right beside Sherlock. The team who wheels him in looks sympathetically at her, but only for an instant. They recognize this corpse, Jim-from-IT, the boyfriend Molly dumped a while ago. It’s a shame, but she’s a professional, after all, and when they leave it’s business as usual.

Molly cannot feel anything other than the turning of her mind, and the slim cold scalpel in her fingers.

And then everything goes wrong.

It takes Sherlock Holmes exactly two seconds to leap out of the body bag he’s been lying in and get onto his feet -But it takes Jim Moriarty much less time than that to wrest the scalpel from Molly’s hand and stab her with it.

Jim is much stronger than Molly remembers. She tries to deflect him, wrest the scalpel back from him. He twists, and the scalpel darts in low beneath her ribs, cuts through her scrubs and through her belly and down into her abdomen; something bursts, hemmhorages, and Molly can only think Oh. Jim twists again, and leans back, and kicks her left knee out from under her. She drops into a broken kneel and watches her blood spread over the tile floor beneath her.

Oh.

“Have you missed me, Molly Hooper?” Jim says.

His voice sounds very loud, very strange. A roar rises in her ears, and she can’t feel her legs, and her face is numb and her belly, her belly oh god.

Sherlock is standing over her now, naked to the waist, whippet-lean, blue-white skin, adrenaline flush pink in his face, a gun in his hands. She doesn’t know where the gun came from. She doesn’t care.

Sherlock fires. Molly hears Jim’s body drop back onto the slab. The mortuary goes very grey, and very cold. Hands grab her, lift her shoulders, cradle the nape of her neck.

“Molly,” Sherlock says, breathless. He’s shivering.

“Sherl…,” she says. “Shr'lock. Didn’t…”

“Molly, stop, don’t… Listen, focus, just… look at me, lis… listen.” He kneels, shakes his head hard, blinks. He’s dizzy, he’s gotten up too fast, the ponticum’s still got a hold on him. He’s going to pass out if he doesn’t lie down.

“Sherlhhh…” Molly slurs. She tries to focus on his eyes. She can’t figure out what colour they are. She’s so confused. They had planned it all to the last detail, but now something isn’t right. her hands are twitching of their own accord and she can’t remember why she’s on the floor. “Sher…”

“Look into my …eyes and… listen… to me,” Sherlock says, gulping back nausea. “This is all wrong, I’ve made …a mistake. Molly. Molly, I am s… sorry. You matter. You matter more than I… but I’ve hurt you. And I’ve put you in a position you don’t… ”

He is too thin, and too pale, and blood is in his hair. Molly tries to get a clot of it out, but she can’t move her arm. “Sher…" 

There are tears streaming down his face, which is not right, and his hands are covered in blood, which isn’t right either, and a dark pool is splitting into rivers in the grout of the tile floor, and Mollycan hear his voice but she can’t figure out what he’s saying anymore.

"Sherlock,” she chokes, because it’s important, he’sso important. “Sherlock.”

“Molly,” he says, “Molly Hooper.” and it sounds strangely like “I love you,” and there is far too much blood on his body for all of it to be his. Her eyelids flutter, and the whirring of the vents begins to sound like a siren, distorted and howling, and then there is n

“Molls. Molls, wake up. Molly. Molly, please.”

Someone is holding her, very very tight, petting her hair. She can breathe, and she can feel her limbs, and she is warm. She’s in bed, she realizes, through a thick haze of desperation. She was dreaming. Now someone’s arms are wrapped around her, and lips are pressed against her temple, and warm breath in her ear coaxes her awake. She can feel a heartbeat throbbing against her shoulder, a little too fast.

She opens her eyes and is jolted by the sight of Martin Crieff’s face, so close to her own. His green eyes shiver for purchase, trying to make the firmest eye contact he can. 

“Molly, it’s all right, you’re in bed,” he says in a low, lilting voice, the one she’s sure he only ever uses with her. He’s so young, and so handsome, and so safe.

She leans against his shoulder and feels his nose press into her hair, his hands smoothing down her arms, his fingers lacing through hers.

“It was just a nightmare,” he tells her.

“Did I wake you?” she asks, hoping she sounds a little more sheepish than she feels.

“You were calling for someone. You sounded so frightened.”

She remembers something, all at once.

“Martin,” she says, trying to sound disoriented. “Martin, what is today?”

“It’s…” he glances past her shoulder at the clock. “Six in the morning on a Tuesday.”

“The date, Martin,” She says, frustrated with herself for caring. “What’s the date?”

“June the sixteenth,” Martin says, nonplussed, and Molly watches herself burst into tears, as if at a distance.

“Oh god,” She snaps, furious and miserable, “It’s the… it, he… jumped today. And… Jesus Christ, Sherlock,” she moans, without really meaning to. Martin makes a noise halfway between outrage and sympathy as he folds her very, very close and kisses her hair.

Molly isn’t going mad, no; remembers what actually happened in the mortuary that night. She performed postmortems on two bodies - Moriarty very dead, Sherlock very still but very alive. She thought of how she’d wanted to kiss him when he woke from sedation, how he’d blushed politely at his own nudity and muttered “Getting to your flat is too risky, I’ll sleep here” and after she’d insisted that he stop being so eccentrically polite and distant and stupid, she started to sob - because what if something had gone wrong, Sherlock, you completely awful bastard, do you have any idea.

“I thought I was going to die, when he,” she groans, very quietly, trying to be vague, hating herself. “I was so angry, I was so afraid.”

“You’re stronger than that,” Martin says, and there is such deep faith and generosity in his voice, oh, sweet oblivious Martin. “I know you loved him, but… well, I think nobody can know why a person would want to kill himself. But he was troubled, Molly. You know that. You couldn’t have stopped him.”

“Don’t say things like that,” she says, muffled, into his neck.  
No  
“Molls,” he whispers.

“Martin, please stop."She pulls away from him.

It has been a year since the world stopped believing in Sherlock Holmes. John’s bending under the weight of grief that Molly can’t imagine, learning to live again, but she’s twisted under the secret she keeps, and there’s nobody to turn to. Not even Martin, who she met six months after at the airport, so dashing and awkward and sweet. She’d told him about Sherlock, because he’d read it in the paper and it wasn’t anything that would shock him. She even admitted she’d loved him, once. But she left the important bits out. Of course she did.

She told Sherlock about Martin via text one day anyway, on a whim.

Met someone. A pilot. Lives with me when he’s not flying everywhere. You’d hate him. He’s called Martin. I hope you’re all right. -MH

To her shock, she’d received a reply ten minutes later.

You won’t tell him anything of course. Too dangerous. - SH

Of course not, just chatting. Shouldn’t make conversation though, not my strong suit. Be careful. Text you if need anything. - MH

Molly Hooper doesn’t understand Sherlock Holmes at all, and she never has. But she wouldn’t have stopped him from doing anything he’s done, no matter how frightened she was, no matter how much his words stung her, no matter how easy it could have been for everything to crumble in their hands. She mattered to him then; she believes in him now.

Molly gets out of bed and makes Martin a cup of tea. He lingers in the kitchen with her, petting her hair, fussing over her, offering to take her out on the river for the day while he’s still in London.

A few hours later she recieves a text.

I never thanked you. You did well. - SH

She turns off her phone and walks over to Martin, drowsing on her couch. She lies on top of him, and curls into his chest a little. His fingers thread into his hair.

"Are you all right?”

“Thank you,” she murmurs.

She’s not quite sure who she’s talking to.


End file.
